Sham Feminism

Here's a grown up article by Camilla Cavendish in The Sunday Times on sham feminism and the infamous 'T-shirtgate' affair; the perfect antidote if you ask me, to some of the superficial drivel written by other columnists I could mention.

Equal pay is a prime example where people's deeds have fallen a long way short of their words.

People like Johann Lamont and Margaret Curran, for example, senior Labour figures in Scotland who like to describe themselves as gender equality champions.

Yet they have had nothing of substance to say about the fight for equal pay that has been raging in Labour-run Scottish councils (Glasgow, North Lanarkshire and South Lanarkshire) for the past 10 years.

So if you ask me, Labour is not just out of touch - the truth is that Scottish Labour has completely lost its way.  


This is what sham feminism looks like

Being pictured in a slogan T-shirt for a glossy magazine is far from what the suffragettes meant by ‘deeds not words’. So how do you fight for women’s rights now?

Camilla Cavendish - The Sunday Times

Photograph: (c) PeopleImages.com

This week you can become a feminist for £45. Some might think that’s a bit — how shall I put it? — cheap. Especially since it involves buying a T-shirt saying “This is what a feminist looks like”, designed by Whistles for Elle magazine.

Elle’s first “feminism” issue — a concept I struggled to get my head around — features Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg, Benedict Cumberbatch and other blokes wearing this T-shirt. Most look as though they can’t believe their luck in scoring such an easy piece of positive publicity. The magazine did not ask them what they are actually doing to promote equality — although the lovely Cumberbatch is certainly promoting himself in an eight-page feature.

I’m quite prepared to accept that an enlightened man can be a feminist and that feminism needs to shed its man-hating image. But the suffragette motto was “deeds not words”. Taking a selfie in a piece of “statement” clothing is a far cry from chaining yourself to a railing.

What turned this glossy gimmick into T-shirtgate was David Cameron’s refusal to put on said item, despite being asked to do so, Elle claims, five times. Miliband and Clegg agreed “without hesitation”, according to the magazine’s editor-in chief, “but it seems the prime minister still has an issue with the word ‘feminist’”.

Maybe he just has an issue with helping to promote a glib marketing campaign when he is supposed to be worrying about terrorism. Or maybe he worries that the term will be used against him. Last year, when asked by Red magazine if he was a feminist, he said: “I don’t know what I’d call myself. It’s up to others to attach labels. But I believe men and women should be treated equally.”

Later he said: “What I should have said is, if that means equal rights for women, then yes... I am a feminist.”

His nervousness about saying something so straightforward is understandable when you look at the waves of self-righteous fuming unleashed by T-shirtgate. Harriet Harman, deputy leader of the Labour party, defied Commons rules to wear the T-shirt at last Wednesday’s prime minister’s questions.“This is what a feminist will look like at Prime Minister’s Questions today,” she tweeted. To which I could only think: no, this is what a shameless opportunist will look like.

What point do these people think they are making? Harman has fought for women’s rights for years. So why is she helping to promote a magazine that makes its money by fuelling women’s insecurities and then selling them anti-ageing creams?

Daisy Sands, the feisty head of policy and campaigns at the Fawcett Society, says the point of the T-shirt is that “it encapsulates anyone who chooses to self-identify as a feminist. It’s about supporting equality — there’s no checklist.” The T-shirt was invented by Fawcett 10 years ago to counter the idea that feminists were “fat, ugly, man-hating and couldn’t get a boyfriend... It was a narrative that was damaging the feminist brand.”

This echoes the findings of The Vagenda blog that young women increasingly think of feminism as angry, offputting and full of jargon, such as “intersectionality” (which means the way that different systems of oppression interconnect).

The feminist movement is becalmed, partly because some of the battles really have been won. Go to #iamnotafeminist on Twitter and you can find women railing against positive discrimination, such as the recent German proposal to force companies to give a third of non-executive boardroom seats to women. These are self-confident women who say they want to be defined by their brains, not their ovaries.

So rebranding feminism may make sense. The Fawcett Society is thrilled with the publicity it has achieved by teaming up with Elle. But the results are perplexing. Launching the actress Emma Watson as “the fresh face of feminism”, and then dressing her so skimpily that it borders on the humiliating, is crass. And I seriously wonder what message the fashion spread of a geisha-like lady wearing a padlocked leather collar would send to my sons if they saw it. It is not one of equality and respect.

Fawcett campaigns to get more women into parliament, to close the pay gap and to increase awareness of the growing numbers of women who are stuck in low-paid work. Sands is scathing about this government’s record on economic equality.

If they are so critical of the coalition, why did they want the deputy prime minister to sport the T-shirt? “Oh, Nick Clegg is wearing the T-shirt in a personal capacity,” Sands says, surprisingly. “He has driven the parental-leave agenda.”

But the society’s most trenchant criticism of the government is the spending cuts, which it says have disproportionately affected women. Isn’t Clegg partly responsible for that? “He does his work as an individual within the confines of his power.”

Oh. So why did they ask Cameron to wear the T-shirt? Would that also have been in a personal capacity?

“Well, obviously it would be perceived as he’s the prime minister — perhaps that’s why he’s more reticent,” she says. There is a pause. “It was about opening a debate,” she says, with admirable honesty.

As gesture politics go, this feels lightweight. And confusing. What exactly is modern feminism?

Watson says: “Women should feel free... to do what they want, to be true to themselves, to have the opportunities to develop.” I can certainly agree with that. But she also says that “feminism is not prescriptive. All we are here to do is to give you a choice.” That makes me furious.

There is a strand of thinking today which argues that women have won when we can opt to wear flats instead of heels. That we are liberated when we have choice. But there are times when we must be prescriptive. We must abhor, unequivocally, the mistreatment of women. That mistreatment is growing in some parts of our country — but those parts are being airbrushed out of the picture.

If modern feminism is to mean anything, it must grip by the throat two of the greatest threats to equality in our society. The first is the failure to value and properly reward the caring roles which are so vital to the functioning of our society. These still tend to be the preserve of women, whether they are looking after an elderly parent or driving from one home to another on an unforgiving zero-hours contract. (The Fawcett Society is campaigning on this — though you wouldn’t know it from Elle.) The second — newer and still woefully taboo — is religious fundamentalism.

I wonder what Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the pioneering English suffragist, would have thought of forced marriage and honour killings. Of state schools that segregate girls and believe female teachers are unclean. Of female circumcision carried out in back rooms on London housing estates, despite the leaflets in Arabic in every London council office — as if exhortation would make any difference. I know someone who recently sheltered an Asian girl who had run away from an arranged marriage and was convinced her family would kill her. In 21st-century Britain she felt her only option was to go into hiding.

If we accept “culture” as an excuse for misogyny, if we take refuge in leaflets, we will unravel 200 years of feminist advance. Our hard-won rights become meaningless if they apply only to part of the population. We won the battle against the misogynist side of Catholicism and the anti-abortion movement in this country; now we must win the battle against the misogynist side of Islam. Modern feminism is not worth much unless it can tackle the subjugation of far too many women in Britain.

There is a long way to go. One of the most shocking conversations I have had this year was with Alexis Jay, the academic whose report on sexual exploitation in Rotherham suggested 1,400 girls had been abused by men of largely Pakistani heritage. Jay believes the kind of abuse being reported by white girls there is also taking place within the Pakistani community. She has been told this by Muslim women’s support groups who are too frightened to say these things when men are in the room.

Modern feminism must give those women a voice. It must celebrate women such as Maryam Namazie, the Iranian-born human rights activist, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born campaigner. The latest issue of Elle magazine does feature some wonderful female campaigners, but those names are notably absent.

I don’t want to sound po-faced. And railing against the paucity of women in parliament or on boards is useful although it brings you up against the fact that many women choose not to fulfil those roles. As the businesswoman Lynne Franks put it at a McKinsey seminar I attended: who wants to sit on a boring board anyway?

Previous generations fought for something more profound than the right to nag blokes into wearing a T-shirt. Modern feminists must reclaim the motto of “deeds not words”. We must take the fight to where it is most needed — which is a long way away from glossy magazines.